In Democratic Individuality, I argued that at a high level of abstraction, modern conservatives, liberals and radicals believe that the best economic, social and political institutions foster each person’s individuality. Their differences are largely empirical or social theoretical. All clash with modern authoritarians. I will take up practical issues such as torture and the lineage of the neocons and link them to larger issues in how we conceive a decent regime, locally and internationally.

About Me

I am John Evans professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Marx's Politics:Communists and Citizens (Rutgers, 1980), Democratic Individuality (Cambridge, 1990), Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy (1999) and Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago March, 2012).

our elections has become
dependent on machines that sometimes leave no paper trail. Manufacturers
have “proprietary” programs and will not let any public officials or
independent experts examine them.

On a cold winter day in 2007,
Andrew Appel, a Princeton computer professor and election specialist, changed
the outcome on one of these machines in seven minutes. He proved something that
should alarm everyone: in effect, it took seven minutes per machine to steal an
election.

In testimony to a House of
Representatives Technology Committee on September 28, 2016, which is now
suddenly paying attention because of the fear of “Russian” hacking,

Appel noted:

“Installing new software in a
voting machine is not really much different from installing new software in any
other kind of computer. Installing new software is how you hack a voting
machine to cheat. In 2009, in the courtroom of the Superior

century ago, because they
promised speed and convenience. They can tally results more quickly than a more
reliable and re-checkable hand count.

From the beginning, there were
ways to corrupt non-computerized machines, Appel said. One such ploy was the
“pencil shaving trick.” Putting shavings on the lever of an opposition party
would choke off counting ballots until the shavings came loose and fell free.

While this left a tell-tale
discrepancy between the counted results and the number of voters who signed in
at that polling place to vote, the scam worked if no one checked.

Latest Computers Easier to

Hack

.

You might think the advent of
computerized voting machines, starting around 2002, would have made it harder
to corrupt

vote counting. In fact, even the
latest generation of such machines are much easier to hack without leaving a
trace.

These machines are big
money-makers for private

corporations, which lobbied
legislators about their

supposed advantages. But they also
pose a serious threat

to the integrity of our
elections.

DRE Direct-Recording Electronic
or “touchscreen” voting machines that leave no paper trail will be mainly used
by voters in 14 states, according to the Brennan Center. Those states include
Georgia, and Pennsylvania — which are in play this year. Even large
regions of Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and many other states still use them.
Among the brand names are Shouptronic,
AVC Advantage,
AccuVote OS,
Optech-III Eagle.

Most of these machines are over
10 years old, and the local authorities have no manuals for maintenance
and repair.

Claiming a lack of funds, state
legislatures have refused to replace them.

In 14 states, either computer
error or Appel-like reprogramming could distort results. Without a paper
trail, the only way to check the tally is through “initial” exit polling conducted
throughout the full span of voting hours and ending when the polls close.

Touchscreen machines were widely
used in Ohio in the 2004 Kerry-Bush election, the only one of 154 American
contests that year in which initial exit polling, which is ordinarily reliable,
was markedly out of sync with the officially announced total. Those who know
about computers have long been skeptical of this result.

As Appel has demonstrated, tt
takes no super-hacking skills to alter voting counts: “I did this in a secure
facility and I’m confident my program has not leaked out to affect real
elections, but really the software I built was not rocket science — any
computer programmer could write the same code. Once it’s installed, it could
steal elections without detection for years to come.”

But if computer experts can hack
every variety of touchscreen machine, what about foreign governments or
domestic organizations?

“Other computer scientists have
demonstrated similar hacks on many models of machine,” Appel added. “This is
not just one glitch in one manufacturer’s machine, it’s the very nature of
computers.”

In late July and early August,
columns by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, and Zeynep Tufekci of The
New York Times questioned for the first time whether voting in American
elections is secure from such hacking — with suspicion directed, though without
evidence, primarily at Russia. Suddenly, the disorganization and lack of
transparency of American vote counting had become a National Security Issue.

Weighing in on the issue,
President Barack Obama pointed out that most American elections are local or
state, done under diverse procedures and laws, and involving a large number of
voters. Even if particular computers, or a system of computers connected to the
Internet, could be hacked from the outside, it would be hard for a foreign or
domestic outlaw to falsify the results of a national election.

On the surface, this is a
heartening thought. But consider a close election like 2004. A targeted
hack — say, altering one candidate’s vote by an algorithm that kicks in as
precincts increase in size — might alter the outcome in certain key counties in
a swing state

In addition, voter registration
lists are centralized and kept on the Internet. During the Arizona and New York
primaries, many Democrats, often younger ones, reported that their registration
was changed without their knowledge. They were listed as a Republican or
Independent or with no year of registration indicated; as a result, they
couldn’t vote in their party’s primary.

This turned out to have been done
by election officials “by accident,” and perhaps also by hackers via Internet
access.

Bones to Pick with Bipartisan
Watchdogs

.

Now elections are watched over by
bipartisan committees in which Appel has some confidence. At least, he points
out, such supervision does not depend on a single powerful party or leader:

“When we elect our government
officials, sometimes we are voting for or against the very person or political
party who is in office right now, running that very election! How can we trust
that this person is running the election fairly? The answer is, we organize our
elections so we don’t have to trust any single person or party.

“That’s why, when you go to the
polls in most places, there are typically two poll-workers there, often (by
law) from different political parties; and there are poll-watchers,
representing the parties to make sure everything is done right. That’s why
recounts are done in the presence of witnesses from both parties. We run our
elections transparently so the parties can watch each other, and the result is
that even the losing candidate can trust that the election was run fairly. “

But there are two problems here.
So-called bipartisanship means that third parties, such as the Green Party and
the Libertarian Party, are by definition excluded.

In addition, many aspects of the
process end up in the hands of a single individual. Chief Clerk of Elections
Diane Haslett-Rudiano arbitrarily stripped 123,000 people from the Brooklyn
voter rolls in this year’s New York Democratic primary. She was later
fired by the Board of Elections — after
the.election was over.

Systemic Weak Points

.

But Appel is even more worried
about a systemic weak point in the electoral process.

“Voting machines are often
delivered to polling places several days before the election — to elementary
schools, churches, firehouses. In these locations anyone could gain access to a
voting machine for 10 minutes. Between elections the machines are routinely
opened up for maintenance by county employees or private contractors. Let’s
assume they have the utmost integrity, but still, in the US we try to run our
elections so that we can trust the election results without relying on any one
individual.”

An error occurred.

The only sure way to run a fair
election, Appel says, is to use and keep paper ballots. In 2009, Germany
adopted a system in which an initial exit poll is announced immediately after
voting closes — this determines a range of plausible results within a margin of
error — and then paper ballots are counted by hand. They have, since that time,
had no major controversies about electoral fairness.

Appel testified that newer,
optical screen voting machines can be equally secure if paper ballots are kept
and checked. Premier Optical Scan with Automark is used, in parts of
California, Colorado, and since 2008, under Secretary of State Jennifer
Brunner, in parts of Ohio. Often, these involve entering your vote, and leaving
a record, which you see in the machine, on a paper tape, of how your ballot was
cast.

But there are two striking
problems with even these somewhat better machines. First, in 2014, the
Environmental Protection Agency discovered that Volkswagens had an internal
computer program which had long passed US emission tests, but polluted forty
times more on the road. The cars were able to recognize when they were
being tested (and had to keep the emission controls switched on) and when they
were on the road and could pollute at will without fear of being caught. As
Barbara Simons of Verified Voting aptly put it, we do not want “VW-style
elections.”

Appel’s mantra is: “any computer
can be hacked.”

Separating paper ballots
physically from a computerized tape and keeping them in a different location,
many computer experts believe, would provide further insurance against hacking
even on optical scan machines.

Second, challenging the results,
particularly in a presidential election and even starting from an automatic
recount, as Al Gore did in Florida in 2000, is very difficult. It would take a
long time to recount the votes, even if the party in power were not trying to
sabotage it…

So the most important thing, as
in Germany, is to get each election right in the first place. Why, we might
ask, have officials sold public elections and the equal right to vote — again,
the most important public feature of our democracy — to private, profit-making
corporations? Once again, these corporations, claiming their programs are
“proprietary” secrets, do not allow any independent check of how they operate.

A few states like New Mexico have
adopted, Appel says, a model procedure for close or controversial elections:

*Immediately conduct a random
recount of part of the paper ballots.

*If there is an error, do a full
recount.

*Do not certify an election until
both are done.”

Appel and nine other experts,
including Lawrence Norden from the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center at
the New York University Law School and John McCarthy of the Verified Voting
Foundation, offered 10 suggestions for securing existing machines and
registration lists. For instance, they underline that “without voter-verified
paper ballots, effective audits are impossible; they recommend checking samples
from the voting system with hand counts of matched sets of paper ballots,
recruiting technical experts to help with such tests, and publicizing the
results, before certification of the election.

They also recommend a new,
detailed ballot accounting by each polling center and reconciliation with the
number of those who signed in to vote there. Still, to put these procedures
into practice would probably require sustained pressure from the voting public.

Moreover, anyone familiar with
vote counting in precincts across the country knows that many computer checking
and security measures these experts recommend are far too sophisticated for
most poll-watchers to implement before the November 8 election. Further, all
Secretaries of State, who are often unabashed political partisans, would have
to have good intentions — an assumption hard to reconcile with the actions of Kenneth
Blackwell in Ohio in 2004 or Katherine Harris
in Florida in 2000.

In contrast, consider the record
of Dana Debeauvoir, election clerk in Travis County which includes the
University of Texas (Austin). She has worked with critics and computer
experts, to propose a new type of encryption plus a paper record (it will not
be ready, unfortunately, until the 2020 election).

A federal law requiring oversight
of elections by politically independent or neutral state officials would vastly
improve the security of the American electoral process. But Appel is not
optimistic about the prospect of Congressionally mandated reforms. For
the upcoming election, some of the recommended measures will be in place in
some jurisdictions across the country.

After this election, however,
with a strong democratic push from below, it might be possible to outlaw the
highly insecure DREs (touch-screen machines), provide adequate funding
as well as training for election officials nationwide, and ensure an
independent paper trail on optical scan machines.

In fact, it might even be
possible to go to a paper ballot backed up by an initial exit poll. In contrast
to this November 8 — when, at best, only the large scale of the election makes
likely a trustworthy result — such reforms would ensure that our elections are,
both in appearance and in reality, fair.

On my chapter on "the Crito; on reading and Socrates's agency" here, I received two wonderful letters from LuAnn Glatzmeier for whom the archetype of Athena, the struggle of women in Athens, and Socrates and Plato are alive...

***Dear Professor Gilbert,Wow - this is a Masterpiece. What Justice you do to Socrates!! My sense is Socrates was alive in a time of debauchery. He had to deny Eros because the existing violation of what Eros truly was - was being abused and used as an excuse to behave in immorality during Socrates' time. All the gods were lost to the "Golden Age of Greece". Yet he maintains Athena's original archetypal tenets for justice in his solidity regarding true justice. Eros is within the heart of Socrates as well as his mind that will not compromise himself. "This is where I have lived. This is where I have served. This is where I love... I am not running to an obscure place when the laws herein are being violated in their truest sense. Sophistry had to be identified as the manipulation that is is. He would not manipulate the variables, but made them starkly clear. He died for that clarity. When the gods of Greece were not distorted as they had become by his lifetime, Athene would have served as the perfect administrator of the kind of Justice that Socrates seeks. But to resort to those earlier archetypes as reference points to truth and proof of his innocence in Socrates' time would not have served him, and would have obscured his message. It is fortunate that Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi were able to inject the heart directly and from directly the core of their message.I am so grateful that someone with your sense of social justice examines this important topic/s. Many Thanks for all your hard work - LuAnn Glatzmaier, Ph.D

***

Dear LuAnn

Thank you very much for a wonderful response which sees much of the spirit of Socrates in Athena as a goddess of justice.. I will write something about this. How just are most founders (Gandhi in India perhaps; Mao in China?). Does one recover them through questioning?

Athena was, in her earlier archetype, an underworld, snake goddess who was part of a matriarchal, non-warlike regime. The Athenian patriarchal founding also imprisoned - bound - women. Socrates' questioning perhaps led to the spirit of justice (being for the laws as decent more deeply; it may perhaps have deviated more deeply from/ reshaped more deeply images of the gods. Eros, in the Symposium, resembles Socrates. The democratic laws of Athens, in the Crito, lose Athena...

Put differently, Socrates's questioning is a form of midwifery - of deeper understandings, "ideas" to the extent which one can get them, in Plato. But both were sexists. In a deeper sense, Socrates was not on to discovering the depths of what had been buried in the emergence of patriarchal Athens, or its moral and political (comparatively speaking) attractiveness. The matriarchal regime is what Engels and Marx later called original communism. Socrates could have questioned back towards it, but it seems a bridge too far...

He did, of course, touch two times on a city of Pythagoreans, of philosophers of whom Theanna was one in the Republic. See here.

And Athens, in part achieving "beautiful freedom" (Hegel) and incarnate in Alcibiades, was both freedom and leadership and beauty, and debauchery, and inner struggle about it.

And Socrates, in the Crito, looked to the far future...

All the best,

Alan

***

Dear Alan,

So true, So true. We had to bring the western reason into the situation, and luckily with Athena, although distorted, still managed to stay stronger than the other deities. As you point to those incredible characteristics of Athena. I like very much how I was taught that she was daughter of Metis, whose provence was "gut knowledge" yet her birth sprung from the head of Zeus - who was so proud of her and her intelligence. Her owl consort brings Metis in again, showing that this is not an Eagle, as with Zeus - this is a trickster creature who hunts in the night through hearing. So rich there. The gut knowledge and intuitive within Athena together with her father's Justice and she, being a Virgin goddess was able to stay clear of being tainted, whereas Zeus' exploits dimmed his reputation for Justice, while hers maintained impenetrable. Athens named after her because they wanted to assure that they would "never be penetrated by the enemy" and given that they were constantly fighting the Spartans or whomever, that pretty much was the case. My favorite aspect of her is that she casts a deciding vote in a tie on behalf of the accused, the mercy vote, just as we honor Lincoln's words "I have always felt that mercy bears greater truth than Justice..." Sometimes these archetypes are right in our midst and we become used to them, thankfully, our Statue of Liberty - Athena incarnate in our core premise. In Greece, the gods may have become frivolous, but not Athena. They may have quit honoring her history and totality, but they didn't imagine her romping around unjustly as did so many of their once sacred divinities. As Apollo strayed from his chthonic roots, he lost his identity, his wholeness, and became a vain, tragic figure.

In my heart I know that Plato and Socrates preserved ancient Greece so that we could have a trace throughout history, or a foundation, a living one, of what was recognizable as the constancy of Truth. Socrates recognized and honored his muse - the woman in him - regardless of the sexuality he may have had. He was informed by his muse. He honored the feminine as much as possible in his day, it was in his core as a philosopher. Most importantly, he left a legacy within which the very notion of equality or recognition for women could emerge. Women were not a lot of things in Socrates' day - they did not have the right to vote, they were used for breeding and not regarded as the eros partner, it was definitely a terrible time for them. But all we do not know is what they were up to in order to persevere through time. The Virgin Goddesses - Hestia for the home altars and vigilantly feeding the hearth so that humanity can continue, Artemis - with her defense of animals and the lesbian dimension of the divine feminine and Athena, exemplar of one who could slay her shadow, the evil snaked headed gorgon that represented a distortion of the chthonic. She accomplishes this with the help of Perseus, and expert "shot" through the mirror. We all have to slay our gorgon, and we all need help with it. But we have to do it. So not was not only was she virginally intact - she was whole. The owl speaks to the nooks and crannies of Justice - the shadow and light aspects of the whole, the unseen and "real" causes of the injustice, and Athena's awareness as you so beautifully put, of a deep chthonic connection to Truth. I think of our revolution in the 60's. Whatever the people may think looking back as a promiscuous time, I think of the revolution of truth that arose as being deeply rooted in the chthonic - the deep act itself. Jung would have been proud, as it is his contention that without the chthonic there is just half a person - a miserable and suffering person. Humankind cannot be whole without the chthonic dimension firmly rooted. That such an instinctual partnering has given way to the truth, that love is naturally loyal, I saw in the 60's as well, and the idea of partnering and maintaining an enduring idea of devotion to one another has thankfully stayed - the worthy goal that it is.

How delightful is this all. Thank you for your wonderful response. These things are so rich, it is a Sunday Morning gift !! (They say the exclamation point is passe' to use in writing at this time, but I will never forsake it.)

It is wonderful you are in dialogue with these gentlemen, it is like playing a musical instrument, the chords and notes of which align the bodily functions, let alone the joy of the heart and mind. There is so much they left unsaid, and you are their voice of continuation in taking your time for this. When we talk about having a "voice" we can't forget our friends who still want to speak from another platform!! We are still the revolutionaries, and we acknowledge that we have "miles to go before we sleep..."

Sunday, October 23, 2016

This is a draft chapter for a book on Socrates, Plato, and civil disobedience. It has been some years in the making. Comments are welcome:

Chapter 3: The Crito: on reading
and Socrates’s agency

A habit of Anglo-American specialists in Plato is to dismiss the notion
of any hidden meanings for his longstanding students in the dialogues.This dismissal often accompanies an odd
refusal to see the dialogues as a whole or consider the relationship between
them. And the zeal for this dismissal is exacerbated, even made visceral, by a
feud with Leo Strauss and his followers.Ironically, many of these philosophers a la Popper agree with Strauss
that the philosopher-king, as the best ruler, one who rules over a heavily
stratified warrior society but often arbitrarily, i.e. without laws, is to be
taken seriously as Plato’s approach. Strauss is actually, on this point, an
acolyte of Martin Heidegger whose major role as a teacher/interpreter of Plato
as a supposed forerunner to Heidegger’s counseling Hitler is largely unknown in
the United States.[i]Heidegger is a more subtle and creative
interpreter of Plato.

One of the themes of the dialogues is, however, as we have seen,the distinction in Phaedrus between ordinary readers for whom writings are like
statues – when you ask them a question, they have no father to defend them –
and students of philosophy, en voyage with Plato, who can achieve as sustained
and intense a happiness as human beings are capable of (Phaedrus, 275d –
277a) A primary site for this distinction is the first book of the Republic
where Polemarchus, initially a democratic bully, wakes up, follows argument,
and becomes, admirably, as reported in Phaedrus,
a "philosophical youth." In the latter, Socrates contrasts
Polemarchuswith his brother, the
rhetorician and Phaedrus’ lover, Lysias. Socrates takes apart a speech of
Lysias, demonstrating, subtly, for students, the difference between argument
and fine but empty rhetoric.

About the Republic in part
three, I will argue that Thrasymachus, the rhetorician, who is also void of
argument, begins to throw Socrates’s argument about justice off track – to make
it unphilosophical - and that this direction is continued in book 2 by the
clever Glaucon who imagines a city of “relishes,” of luxuries and war rather
than a Pythagorean city, a city of Socrates. Thus, the city in speech, despite
a shadowy philosopher-king, is, psychologically speaking or in terms of soul
(psyche) as Plato envisions it, Glaucon’s ideal and mainly a subject of satire.

1.Is the Crito rhetoric or philosophy?

Like Socrates’s dialogue with Polemarchus, the
Crito is also a way in to beginning to philosophize. But this is not
because Crito isgood at argument.Instead, the dialogue offers hints to Plato’s
longstanding students about how to reason about confusing arguments, Crito’s
and those of the democratic laws of Athens which are conjured by Socrates.As we will see, what Socrates argues in the
person of the laws, is contradictory, offered for a specific rhetorical purpose
(to convince Crito), and pretty plainly, not what Socrates himself, let alone
Plato, actually believes.

Crito, a wealthy friend of Socrates,
forgets himself. He is so frantic at the possibility that Socrates will die,
that he will lose the pleasure of listening to good conversation as well as
losing his friend, that Athenians will think badly of him for letting his
friend go to his death when he had plenty of money to organize an escape, that
he speaks, rhetorically, in a very panicky way. Though often attending Socrates,
he is not much of a philosopher himself. Like Cephalus in the Republic,
he likes to be entertained, though Cephalus, going further, wants Socrates to
be what a medieval might call a court jester.But to read aloud Crito’s statements is to see how off they are.

Just before Socrates introduces the
speech of the laws, Crito concludes his harangue by saying: "be persuaded
by me" (line 46a "ἀλλὰπαντὶτρόπῳ, ὦΣώκρατες, πείθουμοικαὶμηδαμῶςἄλλωςποίει."). As a kind of sophist - those
who teach for pay how to argue in court assemblies - he speaks as a lawyer.
Crito rhetorically presents the defenses and remedies Socrates chose not to use
at his own trial: do I not have children? Can I please go into exile?

In the person of the laws, Socrates answers, using this same phrase
(54d)

In this sense, Crito also represents or
speaks for the democracy, the considerations that move most of those who
condemn Socrates but who would have been happy enough to see him go into
exile.That punishment he had, once
again, refused at his trial.[ii]

Before offering the speech of the laws, Socrates goes over, for
interested students, how the argument (ought to) work. He insists on their
mutual starting point that it is wrong to return evil for evil.That principle founds nonviolence; Socrates
shares this principle, in the history of political thought and action, with
Gandhi, King and Jesus. Socrates insists that the arguments which convinced
himself and Crito in a state of calm – when Socrates did not have to go to his
death – must now be tested again and cleaved to if true rather than thrown
aside in panic.

What this signals to Plato’s students
is: follow argument. Do not be persuaded by fear or rhetoric. Let your passion
for justice adhere to, flow from what is true.

Though comparatively brief, this difficult dialogue requires the same
careful assessment as the Republic (it is but 11 lines, 43-54). The
music of the argument is not stated fully in the dialogue. Like a
Corybant, as himself a Corybant – consider also his advice to Meno, who
is from Thessaly, to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries (Meno, 77e)
– Socrates hears this music.But what he hears is not made clear in the
dialogue itself. For here he takes on the persona of the democratic laws of
Athens - “Socrates” is but their interlocutor - as he takes on the persona of
“Diotima” in speaking of love and, by the by, blaspheming Eros as non-divine,
in the Symposium.

Each student must think this speech
through for herself.

“Be well assured, my dear friend, Crito,
that this is what I seem to hear, as the
Corybants seem to hear the flutes, and this sound of these words re-echoes
within me and prevents my hearing any other words. And be assured that, so
far as I now believe, if you argue
against these words you will speak in vain

Note that Demeter and Persephone, the powerful
women/goddesses who led the Corybants and opiates in the Mysteries, and
nurtured law-givers, underlined in Part 1, probably figure in this
understanding.

2.The Contradictory Arguments of the Democratic
Laws

The bookends of the speech of the democratic laws of Athens, a
seeming idea of laws in the mouth of
Socrates, are, on the one hand, Socrates’s indication of the importance of following
argument exactly and not being convinced by rhetoric and on the other, his
unusual invocation of the power of a particular, unstated argument that moves
him:

Socrates: “Speak, Crito, if you
have anything more to add, but you will not convince me.”

Crito: I cannot.

Socrates: Then let us so act since
so the God leads."

As Plato’s indication of Socrates’
deeper piety, the Crito ends (the second to last word: theos) as, once
again, the Apology does, on the word: the god…

But given this sharp framing by Socrates,
what he - or Plato at a triple remove, invoking Socrates invoking “the laws of
Athens speaking to ‘Socrates’ - depicts the laws as saying is disappointing. As
I have emphasized, the laws conclude their contradictory and rhetorically
persuasive but logically unconvincing speech, with the emotional, competitive
statement, echoing Crito: “be persuaded by us.” (ἀλλὰμήσεπείσῃΚρίτωνποιεῖνἃλέγειμᾶλλονἢἡμεῖς. 54c-d) They echo the law courts in response to Crito’s plea:
be persuaded by me. These are, after all, “the laws” of democratic Athens
governing trials in courts with several hundred jurors.

This echo of the courts is,
however, Plato’s signal that both the laws and Crito are, in some way, on the
wrong path. They are sophists, rhetoricians, Crito moved by, giving voice to
the concerns of and speaking to the democracy as it stands, not a regime, as
Socrates envisions it, which would make space for questioning, dissent and
philosophy. Crito and the laws argue to persuade the other, demagogically, but
not in search of the truth. Once again, the final line is Socrates telling
Crito to speak, but then saying, in this one instance in the dialogues – he is
further along the path of arguments than Crito, hidden ahead in what is
unstated in the dialogue – that Crito will not persuade him…

"Be well assured, my dear friend, Crito, that this is what I seem
to hear, as the Corybants seem to hear the flutes, and this sound of these
words re-echoes within me and prevents my hearing any other words. And be
assured that, so far as I now believe, if
you argue against these words you will speak in vain. Nevertheless, if you
think you can accomplish anything, speak.

If we ask what in the speech of the laws
convinces Crito and makes him fall silent, the answer emerges quickly.[iii]
Socrates refers to Crito pointedly at a number of junctures in his speech,
particularly warning that having bought off the jailer and gotten Socrates to
escape to Crito’s friends in Thessaly (the “unruly” Thessaly from which Meno
comes), Crito’s wealth would be forfeit in Athens. Crito, a rich and powerful
man, is a little high on himself and not very bright. He has bought the jailer;
he has come in to persuade Socrates to escape with ordinary appeals that will
not convince Socrates. He initially acts with fear for Socrates, fear for his
own reputation, and in a certain way, hubris. He has thus not recognized the
danger to himself.

"For it is pretty clear,” the
laws/Socrates say, “that your friends [Socrates’s] also will be exposed to the
risk of banishment and the loss of their homes in the city or of their
property.“

Crito is braced by the icy wind of this – for him - chill possibility.
His thoughts turn from the benefits he receives from Socrates’s conversation
and care that Socrates be alive to fear for loss of standing and property.What Crito fears is precisely what Socrates
does not. Having undergone the trial and sitting in the jail, Socrates hopes to
influence the far future of which one can have but little picture, not to make
a short-term impression.

In addition, Socrates equips Crito with the contradictory arguments of
the laws. Crito can tell the people of Athens both that Socrates, though
refusing to give up questioning, is the slave of the laws, bowing down to them
even more than to the beatings of irate fathers.Recall the charge in Aristophanes’ The
Clouds that after going for help to Socrates, Strepsiades is beaten by his
son Pheidippides who also threatens his mother.It was a comic cliché among Athenians that Socrates’s questioning, in
some sense, challenged ancestral pieties and was dangerous, not just a
particular theme of the trial. Now of course, the aim of every speaker in court
- every lawyer, every sophist - is to make the worse argument the better.That, in The Clouds, is a charge
against Socrates. But that is what Socrates does not do in his defense at his
trial and in asking questions to seek the truth.It is why, despite his superior rhetorical
abilities, Socrates is, in fact, an anti-sophist.

But as a longterm, devoted follower
of Socrates and an Athenian, that Crito would have been convinced by the laws'
argument that Socrates was "their slave" would have been amazing. He
could never have listened to a single conversation of Socrates…But it was
something for him to say later to others.

Note that many scholars read Crito
sleepily, think that this argument of the laws, along with the rest, is
compelling philosophically...Were it true, there would be no philosophy, no
Socrates in the first place.

To
reject such slavishness is the point of Socrates’s questioning of Cephalus in
the initial conversation in the Republic. Cephalus means the head or
brain. He was an arms manufacturer and a fierce loyalist to Athenian traditions
making sacrifices to the gods as he was dying, even though he was also an
immigrant (a metic). Monied immigrants are, psychologically, sometimes the most
zealous, foolish defenders of the ways of their new city or country.[iv]Cephalus is the father of Polemarchos, the
leader of the democrats; Polemarchus’s name means “war leader” and “the head”
is an arms manufacturer…

He is also the father of Lysias, the
rhetorician. A war merchant, the “head” Cephalus had a penchant for grim names:
Lysias means destroyer or dissolver.Plato’s
image in Phaedrus of different
psyches having different loves is incarnate in Cephalus and the names of his
sons…

Before Polemarchus becomes
philosophical in book 1, he is but a democratic bully and arrests Socrates, a
counterpart to Lysias' rhetoric in the courts. Both think they know - and
ornament or make war for - what they do not. The Apology here is axial for the Republic and Phaedrus
in the sense that one will not understand these dialogues without it.[v]

Being a metic though a rich man, Cephalus
lives down in the Piraeus with the sailors, not up on the heights of Athens
with Glaucon, Adeimantus and Plato (sons of Ariston or the best, line 327a)

Preparing to die, Cephalus is interested
in Socrates for entertainment, recalls poems and flowery thoughts to brush away
fear. But Socrates is no more Cephalus’s slave or jester than he is that of the
democratic laws in Crito. Socrates must drive Cephalus out to begin
philosophy.[vi]
He asks Cephalus if, in paying his debts, he is trying to buy the gods’ favor.
Cephalus has, after all, money for the sacrifices, not a concern for virtue,
let alone an interest in a dialogue which Socrates molds to ask about justice.

Cephalus retreats to his sacrifices, a
prerequisite for the philosophical questioning and answering which marks the
discussion with Polemarchus in contrast to the fierce exchange of epithets with
Thrasymachus, punctuated by argument from Socrates, or for that matter, the
joking at the expense of/toying with Glaucon.

Cephalus bequeathes his opinion - that
justice is paying one’s debts, which becomes justice is benefiting friends and
harming enemies – to his son Polemarchus, and exits.

Now Crito, ”my old and dear friend,” participated with Socrates in many
philosophical discussions, including in the Phaedo.As his body stiffens from poison, Socrates’
last, ironic word – ironic also in memory of Crito’s plea in this dialogue - is
to Crito is to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of health.

Socrates is known for asking questions
and “making [the interlocutor’s] words get up and walk away from me,” like the
statues of Daedalus. These are opinions, perhaps true, but not knowledge (Meno,
97d). If Crito did not understand this about doing philosophy, he understood
nothing.

In addition, Crito might think that a
philosopher may seek rule if the

Republic is taken superficially, but a philosopher is certainly no one’s
slave. No one would describe Socrates’ paradigm speech of defiance at his trial
as “slavish.” So once again, Crito may have used this opinion to persuade other
Athenians, but cannot have, at least on becoming less frightened for himself,
believed it.

In contrast, the second argument of the
laws – that Socrates has, as a free man, made a contract with them, that
he has left Athens less than others, going abroad only to the Isthmian games
and following the laws, as a soldier – is the opposite of Socrates’ purported
subservience to them. But remarkably, these democratic laws do not appeal to
their own justice. Whatever the merits of the democratic laws which they do not
speak to, Socrates has, by living so long in Athens, they say, assented to
them.

This is a serious argument and one which
is part of the reason why Socrates, in following his own nature, adheres to
these laws in accepting his sentence and exemplifies or founds what Gandhi
later calls satyagraha or civil disobedience.

But
this argument, too, is surrounded by superficial and panicky rhetoric. For the
laws say to Socrates, personally, unnecessarily and arbitrarily – they have
already provided the reason that he stayed as a free man, a party to a decent agreement – that he has left Athens less than any other, going abroad only
to the Isthmian (Olympic) games.

Worse yet, the laws speak of what is by nature just at a single point,[vii]
but their appeal to Socrates here is about their agreeableness to him. We gave
you the chance to leave, and you didn’t. Therefore we must be pleasing to you, they say, unctuously,
over and over. (52e-53a)

"Are you then' they would say,
'not breaking your compacts and agreements with us, though you were not led
into them by compulsion or fraud and were not forced to make up your mind in a
short time, but had seventy years, in which you could have gone away, if we did
not please you and if you thought the agreements were unfair? But you
preferred neither Lacedaemon nor Crete, which you are always saying are well
governed, nor any other of the Greek states, or of the foreign ones, but you
went away from this city less than the lame and the blind and the other
cripples. So much more than the other Athenians were you satisfied with the
city and evidently therefore with us, its laws; for who would be pleased
with a city apart from its laws? [τίνιγὰρἂνπόλιςἀρέσκοιἄνευνόμων].

This is a feeble appeal. For the “laws”
or better arbitrary decrees in a tyranny are, in some sense, pleasing to the
tyrant and perhaps his coterie, and sometimes, the people (Xenophon, Hiero). Even in the latter case, they
are often defective, unjust, repulsive (consider the “popularity” in the Jim
Crow South of “white” family picnics to see a lynching…).

As the Republic suggests by way
of contrast, laws are only “pleasing” to a philosopher only in the light of
their justice. In some respects, though perhaps not from the point of view of
tolerating questioning and philosophy, the laws remind Socrates that he thought
Sparta and Crete "well governed."One must also recall Socrates' irony here, since, after all, such cities
did not allow space for...him.

But the democratic laws of Athens neither
speak of their own justice nor even, comparatively, that they mandate good
governance…

But though they do not speak directly of
their goodness or justice, the laws do powerfully invoke Socrates’s agreement
as a free man; that is, in fact, part of the justice of a democracy, particularly
compared to authoritarian regimes, including the supposed rule of a
philosopher.

They also say that Socrates must persuade
the laws to change or obey them. The latter point, too, the capacity of
ordinary citizens to get the laws changed, to have a say about matters of great
moment – matters of conscience in a modern idiom – without a revolution is an
important element in the larger justice of a democracy.Still, to win such changes, it usually takes a
movement from below, often involving revolution or availing itself of civil
disobedience, for instance, the American Revolution, the movements against
slavery, for women’s suffrage, for unions, for civil rights, against
homophobia, against aggression, to challenge deep injustices.

But Socrates has already answered their
thought, as Crito might have heard, in the Apology. A just man, Socrates
suggests, cannot participate in politics without quickly being put to death.
For once again, he said, when he was in the Prytany and judged the case of the
sea captains, who had during the battle of Arginusae, neglected, againstthe custom, picking up the dead because they
were still locked in combat, and he said they should not be put to death, the
people, resenting these aristocrats who had survived, called for their death as
well as forSocrates's.[viii]

The second time was when he refused to
bring Leon of Salamis to be murdered by the Thirty, who were led by Socrates’s
student and Plato's cousin, Critias.

And the third time was this trial in
which Socrates would be sentenced to death under the democratic laws. But here the justice of what Socrates was trying
to do, what he himself brought to the trial, is left unstated. The laws’
case for the justice of what is happening to Socrates, why he must go to his
death is, as offered, weak and unpersuasive. Surely a Socrates at 50, having
more than “a short time" to live (38d) might, given these arguments, have
departed.[ix]

Now Socrates conjures the voice of the
democratic laws speaking to “Socrates.”So a careless reader may assume, given the power of this metaphor, that
the laws speak for Socrates, that they are the
Platonic idea of democratic laws.Instead, they are, in their confused, rhetorical way, just a device to
convince or silence Crito.Socrates
indicates at the end, unusually in the dialogues, that he is further along the
path of arguments, the way through the woods (Heidegger), than what he has said
to Crito.But Crito offers no response.

The “Socrates” in this speech is like
“Socrates,” the interlocutor who stumblingly answers Diotima’s account of love
in the Symposium, once again, in a
speech of Socrates.There, as we have
seen, the desire to avoid charactizing Eros as not divine - as driven,
combining poverty and resource, ever fading, ever reviving, but no god - is put
seemingly in the mouth of Diotima.But
what is the argument here?

In these complex mirrors, what Socrates
thinks and what Plato thinks – Socrates, from a standpoint of greater
understanding invoking “Socrates,” Plato invoking a more complex Socrates
invoking a dummy “Socrates” -may slip away.

Thus, Socrates, for his own reasons, again ones not explicitly stated in the
dialogue itself, does not leave.

To underline the merit in the
laws’ argument: there is an appeal to Socrates, the free man who consented.
They are the laws of a free regime.

And these laws say: we leave each person
an out – each can take his property and move to a colony, for example. That is
a further appeal to free men.

Being democratic, they add: persuade us
to change or obey us. Here, again, they invoke persuasion in the assembly -
trials were a form of assembly, not a separate thing - as the argument between
Crito and the democratic laws, not yet including philosophy, involves
persuasion. But such persuasion is mere rhetoric, useful for the occasion,
unconcerned with the truth.These
arguments of the laws by themselves would not have persuaded Socrates, among
other reasons, because of the constant threat of death when he entered public
life.

Nonetheless, this third argument -
persuade us - contributes to Socrates’ founding of civil disobedience or
satyragraha. It is profoundly why Gandhi and King (and Jesus) are right about
Socrates as a defender of/questioner or dissenter in Athenian democracy who is
loyal to it and its laws taken as a whole, and Heidegger and Strauss – that
Socrates is a would-be ruler on the model of a “good” gymnastics coach,
reinforced by tyrannical power - are wrong in a fundamental way, the way of
admiring the Fuehrer’s rule over “racially deficient” others or, in the U.S.
recently, advocating “commander in chief power” for aggression and torture.[x]

For Socrates breaks the unjust law
against questioning the gods (when the gods do evils for example, Zeus in the
form of a swan raping Leda, or more subtly, in the Symposium, about whether Eros is a god).

Now as I have underlined, the setting
here in Crito is graphic, the let
down in what the laws say, as philosophical argument, sharp. Ro the laws’
speech, even in the better second argument appealing to a contract, is, unsurprisingly,
rhetorical, and mirroring Crito, fairly panicky, down to the phrasing. Their
speech, once again, Socrates’s, shows that Socrates can perfectly well speak in
the manner of the courts, despite his ironic comment about being a stranger to
this scene at the beginning of the Apology, and pokes fun - Socrates
does this quite a bit - at Crito’s rhetoric. Yet it does not, if one pays close
attention, reveal what it is that persuades Socrates. The careful reader must
follow the argument out, see the contradictions and fill in what is missing,
ask questions, think beyond what is stated.

3.Is it better for the laws of Athens that
Socrates escape?

This need is made stark if we recall a
further argument from the Apology. For as Plato tells us in Socrates’s
speech about his punishment, but for a scrap of life, you, the majority in
Athens, will become the city that murdered its wise man. (38c)

“It is no long time, men of Athens, which you gain, and for that those
who wish to cast a slur upon the city will give you the name and blame of
having killed Socrates, a wise man; for you know, this who wish to revile you
will say I am wise, even though I am not.“

Instrumentally speaking therefore, it
would be much better for the democratic laws if Socrates had slipped off,
disguised as a slave. They mock this possibility, making a theme in their
speech of the issue of bondage and yet contradicting their previous assertion:
he is their slave, they had said,
though somehow, he should feel badly about slinking off as - a slave…

Through lack of moral character,
Socrates could have saved the democratic laws from becoming the killers of a
just man. But Socrates had integrity. He obeyed the laws. And in a heavy spiritual burden, a kind of curse, the Athenian democracy
is remembered to this day for murdering its philosopher.[xi]

The ruins of old Athens stand on
hills above the modern city; the Athenians were slaughtered in the Acropolis by
the cruel Roman Empire in 88bc. The punishment of and scorn for Athens are real
as is the absence, in modern times, of the splendor of that democracy except in
the great protest movements recently occurring from below (only their fascist
opponent, Golden Dawn, receives much publicity in the corporate press).

Plato was already aware of this
coming fate when he wrote; Socrates, too, may well have foreseen it.

So again instrumentally speaking, that is, in
terms of reputation, Socrates injures the laws through his seeming fidelity to
them. These democratic laws talk themselves, as it were, into their own defeat.

This disgracing of the democracy leads
Leo Strauss to think that Socrates went to his death sneering at the laws. As
an atheist and a reactionary, Strauss imagines, Socrates cannot have heard
their voice as the Corybants hear the flutes. He was a would-be
philosopher-tyrant - and Plato more so - striving, to the last, to ridicule and
destroy the democratic laws of Athens, nursing, as Xenophon’s Memorabilia suggests, a passle of
aristocratic followers to implement this result.

But to follow Strauss’s reasoning,
Socrates would then be full of anger at the Athenian laws, wanting only to
play, with his death, a last, nasty trick on them, thinking in dyring but of
them, not himself, shunning his daimon or inner voice, steaming with resentment
(Strauss purports to be a follower of Nietzsche – whom Freud could not bear to
read because he superstitiously thought all his psychological insights were already
there - but is remarkably, psychologically obtuse).

This is so psychologically implausible
a way of talking about Socrates’ dying that it is amazing that Strauss and his
followers - those few who see this subtlety - do not turn away from Strauss’s
account. If that was the way he left this life, Socrates would not be an
ironist but rather a poor, deflecting, demented fellow. Instead, Socrates’s
inner voice or daimon does not warn him against this course. There is precisely
no evidence in the way Plato depicts him for Strauss’s conclusion.

Fortunately, this is not how Strauss
himself died.His letters in volume
three of Gesammelte Schriften are dignified and striking in the wonder
of what he recalls. But Strauss did not rethink, when he was dying, what he had
said about the death of Socrates.

As opposed to Strauss’s fantasy, the Crito
shows the calmness and even cheerfulness of Socrates, his dreams of a woman in
white saying that on the third day he must go to fertile Phythia.(44b) This is
Achilles’s homeland in Homer’s Iliad (ix, 363), that he knows, when
speaking with Priam after killing his son Hector, he will not see again.

In contrast, Socrates’s or philosophy’s homeland is death, and at the
end of the Phaedo, he makes a comparable remark, stiffening with poison,
that Crito, poor loyal Crito, must pay, too late, Socrates’ debt: sacrifice a
rooster to Asclepius, the god of healing the body.[xii]

One can also attempt to read the Phaedo
and this remark in the Apology as simply a personal account of dying.
Socrates had cultivated philosophy, and in Montaigne’s famous later phrase, to
“philosophize is to learn how to die.” But there is, of course, something more
than personal here, a defense of philosophy. For Socrates is, through and
through, a philosopher.

In addition,there is a decisive political or democratic
element in Socrates’ decision, one which King, in his "Letter from the
Birmingham City Jail" and Gandhi in his 1908 translation and commentary on
the Apology deeply understood. This
is an intrinsic good about a decent or good regime, and not something merely
instrumental. At 70, Socrates makes the judgment that it is better for him
to die, honorably, defending questioning, than to escape, grovel or live in
exile dishonorably. The most important point is that Socrates himself fights
for the freedom to ask questions of those who think they know, point out if
they do not, and not be killed for it. This not only founds philosophy. It is
also, contra the usual, superficial interpretation of Socrates as an
anti-democrat, ingredient to a common good-sustaining or robust democracy.

Note, however: that Socrates
sees questioning as ingredient to a decent or common good-seeking democracy
does not mean he has a full conception of the justice of such a regime.It would take 2100 years before the ideas of
equal freedom of conscience and freedom of speech would be named – contrary to
the Inquisition, St. Bartholomew’s Day in France and murderous English kings –
in the public sphere in Europe.[xiii]

Mob rule is often the tyrannical rule, in Aristotle’s idiom, of a
particular interest (the rich and powerful stir up right-wing movements of a
Klan or McCarthyist sort).[xiv]In contrast, a common good-sustaining
movement, say the union movement or anti-war movements or the American civil
rights movement or the women’s movement or the abolitionist movement or the
Revolution or the indigenous movement or the movement for gay and lesbian and
transgender equality, are democratic movements from below. Without questioning
and sacrifice, such movements are not possible.For mirroring the fate of Socrates, many others, like my friend Andrew
Goodman along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, would be martyred for
asking questions to segregationists and acting for justice.

King invokes Socrates three times in his
"Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” written on the back of a New
York Times. To complacent white ministers who denounced him as an “outside
agitator,” King responds:

"In your statement you asserted
that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they
precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like
condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil
act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving
commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided
popular mind to make him drink the hemlock?"

King then analogizes the nonviolence of
the movement against segregation to Socrates’s image of a gadfly irritating a
great horse:

"Just as Socrates felt that it
was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise
from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative
analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent
gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men [and
women] to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic
heights of understanding and brotherhood."

Finally, as I emphasized in chapter
two, King speaks of resistance from below to great injustices:

"Of course, there is nothing new
about this kind of civil disobedience... It was practiced superbly by the early
Christians who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of
chopping blocks, before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.
To a degree academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced
civil disobedience.”[xv]

Preparing for his death, Socrates goes
through many arguments, including with the Pythagoreans Simmias and Cebes in
the Pheado about the soul’s immortality and a war with the body.He takes the poison with politeness even
toward his guard. He does not wait for the last moment; he finishes the
arguments with the others, fashioning what he needs to say on that day in his
accustomed manner, and then to spare the jailer waiting - the jailer is in
tears - drinks the poison almost as Gandhi says, as one would quaff a cup of
sherbet…[xvi]

This is not someone aflame to bring down
the democratic laws…

For Socrates does not speak or act
instrumentally with a view to his own or the laws' reputation. He is not trying
to curry favor with a McCarthyite majority opinion, those who lightly kill and
would as lightly, were it possible, bring him back to life. Socrates is
fighting for questioning – dissent – in the democracy as well as for the
practice of questioning which is philosophy. Founding what Gandhi names satyagraha and standing up against the
corruption of his own people, Socrates dies to make a space for a decent
democracy as well as for philosophy.

And the laws he speaks here to modify:
obey us but you may also “persuade us to change,” would be those of an
idea of democracy which can honor questioning.Such a democracy would go beyond Socrates's long life – 70 years – for
Athens had been a dominant power which allowed the emergence of questioning, whereas
an authoritarian regime, the supposed city in speech or Sparta or Crete, would
not tolerate questions, would not tolerate…a Socrates.Such a democracy would come to be beyond
Socrates’ life, in fact, hundred of years later.Socrates seeks to practice and portray the
idea of the democratic laws, not the existing, sophistic and excitable - like
Crito! - laws of the Athenian court.

By this actions, Socrates seeks to transform
the latter, to make them more thoroughly democratic - in the sense of a common
good-sustaining democracy - through his death…

Some modern scholars are confused by
Socrates’s insistence on reasoning with only one witness, not deferring to the
views of the many.That Socrates
opposes, through argument, the deficiencies of sometimes tyrannical democracies
does not mean that Socrates cannot aim to advance questioning and affirm a
deeper democracy.

Sustaining questioning is the political
purpose of his speech as much as creating a space for doing philosophy. For Socrates’s (and Plato’s) philosophy is
not, as it appears superficially, anti-democratic, but rathergenuinely democratic, making deliberation
about a common good possible within a democracy.

But that idea of questioning would be
realized in laws – for the first time,
just laws– nearly 2000 years in the
future in regimes which, on paper, to some, began to guarantee individual
rights to - or equal freedom of - conscience and speech.The regime, as the particular laws, would be
a very different kind of representative democracy (or what Plato or Aristotle might
have more aptly called: an oligarchy with parliamentary forms).

4. Acting for a future aspect of
justice

In the Apology or the Crito,
does Socrates have the idea of such a regime?Not remotely.“I know that I know
nearly nothing” about that idea is a plausible way of imagining/recalling what
Socrates might say.He understands
certain major features of justice, that philosophy and questioning should be
allowed, not subjecting the questioner to death or exile. But those features of
justice are in the far future (in Cordoba and Granada, for practitioners of
minority religions, in fourteen hundred years, in England and France, as a
named individual right, in 2000 years).As Gandhi and King say, Socrates also thus founds the practice of civil
disobedience to remedy glaring injustice.

But the question: what is justice? in
book 1 of the Republic has no full answer at any given time.Specific practices to achieve aspects ofjustice - establish questioning and
dissent/disobedience for particular purposes – are clear and the subject of
Socrates’s action, but no overall vision is possible.

Even freedom of conscience or freedom of speech is a limited, though important
institutional reform, for some, as Hegel says, 2100 years later.In America, to work out a decent democracy in
the twenty-first century with the survivors of genocides – indigenous people,
African-Americans – is not yet available in more than name.Nor is how to organize democratic and
rights-sustaining institutions under a novel, predatory dispensation of finance
capital and militarism.

Thus, nothing like a city in speech is
true of what Socrates (and Plato) contribute, as Socrates repeatedly hints in
the Republic.For instance , he says the ordering of a just
city is clearer than, must reflect and cast light on, the right ordering of an
individual psyche.That this analogy is
doubtful is obvious on a moment’s thought, even if one has not read carefully
Glaucon’s shifting Socrates’s argument from proposing a just city to sketching
a fevered city and its “ideal,’ a city built to make war and acquire/steal
things from others, a city which the city of guardians – kallipolis – makes somewhat
more refined.

This authoritarian city in speech ruled
by a philosopher for military men (and women) - who have all the same feelings,
the same customs - cannot be Socrates’ vision of justice.For it does not underpin – instead, it bars-Socrates’s
fateful foreshadowing/enactment of what are later named equal individual rights
of conscience and speech and civil disobedience.Those who take the philosopher-king literally
– Heidegger who sought to cozy up to Hitler and Leo Strauss never heard of
civil disobedience - despise questioning
in a democracy.They abjectly betray –
are self-consciously enemies of - Socrates’s remarkable contributions in speech
and action to the nature of a democratic regime and the practice of
disagreement and conflict within it.Theirs – and common and less
scholarly interpretations a la Popper and even I.F. Stone – are a terrible
mistake.

Thus, the covert meaning of the Crito is that a genuinely Platonic idea of democratic laws needs to protect
questioning against the brittle Athenian charge, not untrue, that Socrates
questions everything including the gods. Socrates is pious, but not in the way
of believing as those who do not question believe. Piety without questioning is
not admirable…And so, Socrates was sacrificed to a pseudo-democratic
fanaticism. But the protection of
questioning which would belong to, Socratically or Platonically, genuine
democratic laws – again, the idea of democratic laws if they came to exist–
would, some 2100 years later, begin to be realized in freedoms of speech and
conscience.

What the dialogue also implies is that
Socrates defends his own honor or virtue as someone who questions, affirms and
strengthens the decency of Athens.Socrates is caught, as he says, only by the slower runner death, while
his accusers have been caught by a swifter wickedness for accusing someone of
committing crimes merely for searching for the truth, questioning the
powers-that-be…

And by that questioning, Socrates seeks
to improve Athens, not to make an ideal city of justice, a city in speech, for
that city does not exist (and is harmful if applied, the object of satire in
the Republic). It is Socrates who upholds and would make the democratic
laws better, more just, more inclusive of opposition and decency. Socrates’s internal
relation to the laws – not an instrumental relationship about their reputation
- upholds their justice more explicitly than, in the imagined speech, the
actual laws, who cannot speak of justice and appeal to “pleasing,” do.

It is Socrates who seeks, by dying, to
make the democratic laws more just.

For his students or careful readers,
Socrates is thus the agent, in action and implication, of a non-rhetorical or philosophical idea of the laws, just
as, in the speech, he is the agent of the rhetorically persuasive but
contradictory law-courts/assembly version of the democratic laws he summons to
persuade Crito. Crito needs sophistry.Socrates does not…

Listen again to the speech of the laws.
If you go to your death, obeying us Socrates, we will honor you here and our
brothers in the place of the dead will receive you with honor.Hades here represents the far future.

And that thought does motivate Socrates
who is looking to the place of philosophy in democracy and to a more decent
democracy – an idea of democracy in Plato’s idiom,- in the future. We still read the Apology,
thanks to Plato, for otherwise Socrates’s words or perhaps, more broadly reasoning
for accepting his martyrdom, would not have survived.We can take in what Socrates fought for in
the democracy including being able to philosophize. But writing does not
explain itself – has “no father’ to defend it, as Phaedrus reveals of the dialogues – and so, misunderstandings of
the Apology and the Crito, not to mention the alleged
authoritarianism of the Republic, are
common.For instead, it is to advance
questioning and the search for the truth - allowing questioning, opposing the
unfairness and injustice of this form of discrimination or of this war, and the
like - which become the task of each generation, down to, and but incompletely
realized in, slowly expanding universal or human rights 2100 years later.

It would have been arrogant for Plato to
say that Socrates seeks to reshape the laws of Athens, democratically and
philosophically. But that is exactly what the Crito implies. That is
Socrates’s gift to the far future. It took his willingly going to his death or
martyrdom to bequeath it.

It would have been less arrogant to say,
what the Apology does say, that one
can have, in practice, but a specific direction of justice, an important
fragment of the idea of a just democratic regime, but no such conception as a
whole.

Democracy, in Athens and in its new forms, is often a sad thing, killing
people and at its best, later wishing them back alive.[xvii]
What Socrates and other martyrs for freedom and decency do – Gandhi and King,
among them – is to challenge and change the greatest evils within a (in
Gandhi’s case, potential) democracy.[xviii]

Socrates warns in the Apology –
would-be students, take heed – that he has only a human wisdom – anthropine
sophia - and is wiser than others only in this: that others think they know and
do not and he neither knows nor thinks that he knows. He improves the
democratic laws by, through personal questioning or protest, forcing them to
recognize this way of life, philosophically and politically. He acts powerfully
for what turns out to be a very long-run change.

Though the dialogue conveys Socrates's agency on the surface - it is,
after all, Socrates who speaks to Crito in the voice of the laws - what he does
in the undercurrent or implication of the dialogue is to shape the laws of
decent democracies – in this central respect - for the far future.[xix]

He thus makes democracy better through
questioning and protecting philosophy at the cost of his life. This central
point resembles Hilary Putnam’s or Amartya Sen’s conception of justice or Karl
Marx’s: one can achieve more just regimes given particular starting points, but
a model of justice, for instance, communism, is, as it were, a long away off,
and not something whose details dreamers/modelers are likely to capture. Again,
Socrates’s ideas on dissent would wait 2100years for an institutional/legal development as equal individual rights,
the American Bill of Rights, for example, and to be still unfolding 2500 years
later.

In Marx, this is the notion of the “real
movement” or democratic, from below, upsurge for change which will create a
better regime in specifiable ways, one that is not a utopia, not to be sketched
as a blueprint beforehand.

And by acting honorably, Socrates honors
the laws as if they were, in fact, what their speech pretends but drifts away
from: defenders of freedom and justice. For the verdict of men is unjust and
beyond this, the law that permits death for questioning the gods of Athens, even
if one is, as Socrates is, impeccably externally
and even internally pious, is profoundly unjust.

And of course, the laws’ appeal about “pleasing” him is base.

That is where further questioning of
the dialogue leads and the death of Socrates gives rise, as Martin Luther King
says in his "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail," to freedom of
speech and conscience as well as academic freedom. In a still to be created
decent regime, one cannot, upon further reflection, put people to death for
opinions or even lock them up, even if the powerful do not like them…

But now let us consider again
Plato’s and Socrates’ counsel to students. Even under pressure of imminent
death, one should follow out arguments and stick with those that, upon
reflection, seem true. An apt dialogue is the assent of one witness, following
the argument, not the opinion of the many. The latter is what Crito throws
against the wall, hoping that his passion and fear will stick for a Socrates
about to go to his death, since Crito does not engage in reasoning. Many
dialogues, including this one, are not philosophical or apt in this sense; they
do not follow out arguments to the truth, but are in some way, deterred by the
interests of - or Socrates’ interactions with - particular characters. In the Meno
for example, Meno coquets with Socrates when he is lost for an argument.Socrates repeatedly points this out, flirting,
in return, with Meno.In the dialogue, only
Meno’s question about whether virtue can be taught, without a specification of
what virtue is, is “answered” mistakenly.

In the Crito, Socrates’ speech
of the laws is faulty. Crito is deterred rhetorically by his fears to be exiled,
his property seized, as Socrates underlines, as well as his fear of what the
many may think of him.The contradictory
claims of the laws supply Crito with things to say to pacify others’
questioning or contempt.

Note that Thrasymachus, Callicles, Phaedrus,
Crito, Meno and Glaucon are all imaginative – Glaucon even conjures the
resonant image of the ring of Gyges which inspired Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray and J.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.But they have no interest in doing philosophy.They are a lot like Dionysius the younger in
the Seventh Letter, who will not
follow Plato’s curriculum starting with geometry, and instead writes a very
likely, foolish book about laws….

Dialogues, thus, rely on the ironic Socrates to drive them through
questioning but sometimes achieve mistaken results, depending on the particular
argument and interlocutor (the Meno,
for example, but we will find many other examples in the Republic).At the conclusion
of the Republic, Glaucon salutes
justice and does not become a tyrant.Unlike
Alcibiades, Glaucon is unknown to history. But it is not as if Glaucon reasons
along with, follows Socrates.Rather, he
falls all over himself trying to please/impress the philosopher.When exclaiming that “you don’t mean the idea
of the good is…pleasure,” Glaucon is
told by Socrates to “hush” (lines).

As we will see, only Polemarchus,
starting as a bully (many democrats do), thinks out arguments, becomes a philosophical
democrat and is murdered by Critias and the Thirty.

Dialogues often point to, imply
questions or further arguments which Socrates and Plato encouraged students to
take up for themselves.

The latter could seem elitist,
inviting haughty aristocrats and soldiers like Glaucon, to be lured, at quite a
distance, into honoring philosophy.Leo
Strauss’s or Heidegger’s view gets stuck at this seeming.For many of those whom Socrates and Plato
talked with were anti-democratic, aristocratic boys with a lurking, sometimes
not even hidden – Alcibiades - aspiration for becoming, themselves, tyrants.But in fact, the complexity of arguments and
the difficulties of philosophizing - eccentric when Socrates does it alone -
could also be a spur to democracy.That
Polemarchus, leader of the democrats, becomes a young philosopher is
remarkable, as is Chaerophon, mocked in Aristophanes’ Clouds, as Socrates’ best student, who left with the democrats to
oppose the Thirty. (Apology,
line)

Once again, to oppose “the many” sounds anti-democratic. But democracies
often do bad things, the KKK and McCarthyism being important examples.
Aristotle, Plato’s student and aficionado of Alexander the Great and one man
rule, nonetheless defends majority rule, to some extent. Sometimes, he says,
the opinion of a large number is better than that of an expert; one might say,
always in terms of unconstrained, one man rule. But sometimes, Aristotle says,
there is no difference between a majority and a “herd of beasts.” Wise majority
rule embodies a common good, something which benefits the whole society.
In contrast, a "herd of beasts" is the tyrannical rule of a
particular interest.

It is the latter and only the latter that
Socrates' questioning fights, tries to correct. So Socrates defends the
democratic laws of Athens and seeks to strengthen them, even as he dissects and
denounces frivolous, grandiose, ignorant though “authoritative” opinions as,
for instance, that of the majority which puts him to death…

In the Meno, one gets an inkling
of what Plato means by ideas from the theorem in Euclidean geometry that the
slave gradually proves under questioning. For it is an abstract idea about a
diagonal, not a particular line in the sand which they investigate. And these
theorems are not visible to the naked eye, just as many of the findings of
modern science such as quarks are not.[xx]

In an obvious sense, Plato's ideas are a counter to empiricism,
particularly in today's social “sciences,” where as with IQ testing, bad
methodological doctrine has run amuk, with enormously destructive social and
moral consequences.

But many seeming Platonic ideas – like
that of the good, likened grandly and metaphorically in The Republic to
the sun in the noetic universe, are only to be figured out, if they are,
through a long journey of subtle readings of the dialogues. The metaphors
surrounding them are as suggestive and unclear as ideas in geometry are
clear.And here especially, one may feel
that one knows not much…

What then should we make of the laws in
the Crito? They are, in one sense, deficient, merely rhetorical. But
improved as Socrates implies with protection for democratic questioning, the
laws could become better. Socrates’s sacrifice of his life makes the laws of
the democracy approach justice, approach, and over 2500 years, incorporate a
central aspect of the idea of a just democracy. They thus move from the sophism
of the courts, as exhibited in a sophisticated form in Socrates’s speech,
through actions for specific goals – Socrates’ emblematic courage, his
sacrifice, his disobedience to injustice in the context of overall fidelity to
laws (John Rawls), towards Platonic ideas.But they never reach such ideas which are, in one important sense, as a
practical project or in their full realization, unknowable. That is a secret of
the Crito...

[i]
Revulsion at Heidegger’s Black Notebooks is at last rightly spreading in
America.But the connection between his
philosophy and teaching – concentrated on the ancients – and his views on Plato
is a further mountain to reach…

[v]
Arguably, it is axial for the Laws -
the Athenians Stranger is a not-Socrates, one who does not take the poison(phobonpharmakon – fear drug, again an
inflection of Aesclepius’s snake medicine) and lives – and most other dialogues
as well.

[ix]
Rightly dissatisfied with the Crito,
Reggie Rivers once wrote for me a further 30 page dialogue, making a case that
Socrates should live.Unique in my
teaching of Plato, what Reggie did by his own lights is, I suspect, what the
Academy asked…

[x]
That neither the philosopher nor the commander in chief automatically “knows”
is revealed, for instance, about Iraq, by Socrates’ question to Thrasymachus:
what if the stronger mistakes his interest? (line).

[xi]
As Franco’s Granada is remembered for murdering its poet, Federico Garcia
Lorca.

[xiii]
In Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy, ch. 5, I name, with John Rawls,
the good regime, as one that upholds individual conscience in opposing
particular unjust wars.That is the 2400
year-extension of Socrates’ thought, what Hegel rightly referred to as a principle
of individual freedom seeking to break through, be named and realized, in
Hellenic political life.See Hegel,
Elements of a Philosophy of Right, additions.

[xvi]Gandhi’s translation of the Apology, "The Story of a
Soldier for Truth," Collected Works, 1908, part 1 and here.Note that Gandhi is, interestingly, more wedded to death than Socrates
or Plato, neither of whom would have offered such a formulation.

[xvii]Even Obama, with the drones has done much of this, including to
Americans like the 16 year old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki

[xviii]
Gandhi often conceived himself as the citizen of an Empire which was not a
democracy.He also thought of a genuine
Indian democracy made up of villages – panchayats – which voted (a more
Athenian-like democracy than modern India, modern democracies and one without
outcastes or slavery).

[xix]
The citizens of Athens debated peace and war, as Thucydides shows us; the
citizen-soldiers of the Roman Republic took an oath to fight each particular
war.That is a large merit of ancient
republics compared to modern representative/parliamentary oligarchies where
delegates, as in the US, rarely debate war, and as in the case of Obama’s wise
nuclear agreement with Iran, speak out only for Imperial domination
(ironically, it is an Imperial Congress here against Obama and the American
people – see.)